In the next few weeks, the US Congress will likely pass gun control legislation. President Obama will sign it into law and both Democrats and Republicans will walk away feeling that they did something to stem the tide of gun violence. That something likely will be to increase the criminal penalties for transferring, buying and using a gun illegally.

It will not be the first time that Congress has skirted the real issue in favour of symbolic measures that "look tough" and make legislators look good by putting more people in prison for longer.

Since the late 1980s, the US federal and state governments have sold imprisonment as the solution to myriad problems that have their roots in much more complex social and economic conditions.

The criminalisation tendency is politically expedient. This "prisons-first" political culture has one big downside: it has created mass incarceration.

Here are five things that everyone should know about mass incarceration in the United States.

1. The US incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation in the world: Approximately 1 in 100 adults or more than 2.2 million people are behind bars in the US, according to the Pew Center on the States. In addition, another 4.6 million (or a total of almost 7 million) people live under some form of correctional supervision.

Although the US is widely recognised as a "land of liberty", it could also be described as a nation of prisons. It incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation. Its imprisonment rate (per capita) is almost 50 percent higher than Russia's and 320 percent higher than China's.

Within the western hemisphere, the US incarcerates five times as many people per capita as Canada and almost 2.5 times as many as Mexico.

The Rest:

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/03/201332671936115766.html

Members of a SWAT team opened fire on an unarmed teenage girl this week when police officers outside of Washington, DC attempted to serve an early morning search warrant.

Myasia Hughley, 18, is recovering from flesh wounds following Thursday morning’s events in District Heights, Maryland. She was asleep in her bedroom at her family house when 15 FBI SWAT agents stormed the house with guns drawn.

“I’m shouting ‘Nobody is armed, nobody has a gun!’ and then all of a sudden I heard ‘She’s got a gun!’ and they just opened fire,” Emory Hughley, Myasia’s father, tells local station WJLA News.

Myasia didn’t have a gun, though, nor did any other member of the Hughley household. The authorities allegedly saw something, and in their minds had enough reason to unleash a barrage of bullets at the girl. Mr. Hughley tells Washington’s NBC News4 that he saw one agent even fire off around seven shots himself using a semi-automatic weapon.

“They almost hit my daughter, man,” he adds to WJLA. “If I hadn’t told her to go back in her room they probably would have shot her.”

“I’ve got eight holes in my wall. One bullet went past my head, almost hit me, ricocheted off my brick wall and some of the shrap metal hit my little daughter in the back of her neck, all for nothing.”

http://rt.com/usa/swat-teenage-girl-hughley-906/